Alligator - Lisa Moore [95]
Frank thought of the first day they had both gone to day-care together with Mrs. Hallett, the foster mother they had shared for six months when they were five. Frank’s mother was in hospital having her breasts removed and Kevin’s mother had left him standing under a tree during the St. John’s regatta. She said she would be right back but it took a month.
When Frank got inside the daycare he could smell chicken noodle soup. The lukewarm, piss-coloured, salty broth in bright plastic bowls dimpled with globules of oil and sinking noodles engulfed him in despair.
Three weeks before meeting Kevin, he’d glimpsed the gauze taped to his mother’s weirdly boyish chest. He’d watched the doctor lift the gauze, look beneath, and touch whatever was under the bandage with his gloved index finger. He gingerly taped the gauze back down and it was the extreme gentleness his mother required that spread the same fear through Frank that had caused him to wet his bed for months after that first operation.
Mrs. Hallett, Frank’s foster mother, was a heavy woman with thick curly black and grey hair that tumbled around her wide red face and onto her shoulders. Her cheeks, close up, were covered with a minute network of capillaries, broken from laughter and exertion in her extensive garden. Her eyes were a light brown, fringed with black lashes, and she had a space between her front teeth.
She was always grinning, glowing with excitement, unless she was lost in thought, bent on her knees in the bathroom checking the temperature of the water for the boys’ baths. She would grunt, absorbed by some inner argument, and push herself up with the knuckles of one hand down on the floor. He can see her pressing down the pastry cutter, too, a tan-coloured bowl tucked into her hip.
She was a nurse and kept her house perfectly clean and made them eat a piece of fruit each night. Frank’s mother had only ever bought McIntosh apples, with the white flesh, barely tinted green.
Mrs. Hallett bought kiwis and mangoes and pomegranates. Frank felt sorry for his mother, that she didn’t know about the diversity of fruit, that her five-year-old son knew more than she did.
The aroma of chicken noodle soup was more than Frank could bear that first visit to daycare, he dug his face into Mrs. Hallett’s thigh and whispered he wanted to go home and she peeled his hands off her and he slapped them back on, clinging to her skirt. She told him she had to go to work, that he was a big boy and she would buy him an ice cream and they would visit his mother.
She left and he threw up. He could remember Kevin looking on solemnly as Frank covered both their shoes with half-digested Cheerios and watery milk. Kevin patting his shoulder as he trembled and shook with dry heaves and eventually Kevin was hugging him, and promising him full ownership of a remote-control airplane, the only toy Kevin had brought with him to the foster home.
Kevin himself had spent the evening of the regatta at the police station and when nobody could be found to come and get him he was sent to the Janeway Children’s Hospital and didn’t see his mother again for a month, by which time Social Services had decided she was unfit to raise him.
After that, she and Kevin met every second weekend, usually at McDonald’s, and in the presence of a social worker. Kevin played in a glass room full of climbing tunnels and coloured balls while his mother and the social worker read the newspaper on the stools outside the window. Sometimes his mother came into the room and yelled up through the tubing for Kevin to behave himself, or to leave the little girls alone, though he was always scrupulously polite and fair with other children, or to come down and finish his milk.
Mrs. Hallett kept Kevin until he was sixteen, visited him every weekend when he moved out. She still took Kevin’s laundry and brought him homemade suppers in Tupperware containers, and slipped twenty-dollar bills in greeting cards on every possible occasion.
Blue smoke bulged out from the lip of the saucepan with